Amid headlines of extreme weather connected to climate change, four seniors at Deerfield Academy believe discussions around the global issue are not always doomed to the doom and gloom.
For senior Stella Porth, the conversation can take the form of a painting of a sweet potato vine. For fellow senior Thijs Wittink, it can be a photograph of a bird soaring through pink clouds.
All of these works appear on a scroll through SPROUT, a digital publication at sproutpublication.org that Porth, Wittink, and fellow seniors Peggy Huang and Luc Ruminski created in the spring for high schoolers at Deerfield Academy and beyond to engage in sustainability. Instead of letters to politicians, data breakdowns or gut-wrenching weather reports, the platform leads with creativity. While the Research tab of a recent digital issue explores topics like the impact of light pollution in Tokyo, Japan, on nearby marine animals, its other tabs are Creative Writing, Photography and Art.
“Artists and people who can come up with creative solutions play a really key role in making change,” said Porth, a lifelong artist. Within the conservation movement, she said, “We need creative approaches that will include many groups that may not see themselves as part of the environmental movement.”
One of Huang’s pieces details a barefoot walk in nature through creative writing — a medium she said packs “more impact when people feel more related to it and enjoy the celebration of what’s important to them instead of just pointing out what’s wrong with the system.” She said her piece celebrates the environment instead of instructing readers to protect it.
“Instead of just being told directly that it’s really important to care about [the environment] more,” Huang said, “it’s a lot more touching when it’s related to you.”
For Ruminski, who focuses on research, his commitment to sustainability surfaced during a “core experience of [his] life,” when he discovered an oil spill at his “childhood beach” in Charleston, South Carolina.
He described SPROUT, which stands for “Sustainable Practices Research and Outreach to Understand Today,” as “breaking down an insurmountable task into small everyday bits that are digestible, that you can actually incorporate, you can actually do something with them.” Beyond the acronym, the pupils chose the name for its meaning of a budding plant.
“Seeing [climate change] in such a pessimistic view prompts people to think, ‘Oh, what difference am I going to make then?'” Huang said.
At 8 years old, Wittink’s mother handed him a “tiny point-and-shoot” for a trip to Africa, a gift that “changed [his] whole life.”
Always drawn to landscapes and nature, Wittink’s earlier works curved toward pristine scenes. Now, his lens leans toward “not always the most beautiful thing, but something that is challenging and needs to be talked about.” Glimpses of conversations about environmentalism with his family sneak into his photos.
One example is a photo of a turtle. Upon first glance, the photo appears to only feature the turtle, but in the corner of the aqua water, a plastic container is floating.
“Thinking creatively about anything, not even just solutions, but the environment in that light, it connects people,” Wittink said, “because it feels like a better way to communicate how it affects you. It feels very personal.”
Growing up on Atlas Farm in Deerfield, the outdoors and art were always pillars of Porth’s life.
“I don’t know that I could pinpoint a specific moment that I started making art, because it’s always been one of the most important things to me,” Porth said. “As I’ve gotten more into conservation, I’ve started to meld those passions.”
Porth’s paintings color the website’s Art tab, from the sweet potato vine dripping in deep blues to an anatomical heart growing vines in a greenhouse and paintings of hands pulling the strings of tree branches in a collection called “Human/Nature.”
“For me, art is always a release, or a place of solace,” Porth said. “For anyone who has that sort of daunting feeling about the future, creative mediums and research — things that help you understand the world and understand the impacts of your actions — might feel gratifying.”
By publishing ideas and art from students at nearby high schools, Ruminski, Wittink, Porth and Huang hope to create a digital dialogue around climate change and sustainability that ripples out beyond Deerfield Academy and “lives past when we end up graduating,” Ruminski said. In the publication’s logo, Porth drew roots below the budding sprout to “represent our network of different schools, but also the network of different types of people or different communities within Deerfield [Academy].
“If younger generations feel like all of this horrible stuff is on their shoulders, it’s almost too overwhelming to be able to act,” Porth added. “If people feel like they have a collective power that’s not so focused on the individual, they might be more inspired.”
